Category Archives: Mexico

Last month, during Jen’s and my visit to Mazatlan, Sinaloa, Mexico, we ate at the highly rated Angelina’s Latin Kitchen. All around us were gringos, almost only gringos, the only ones able to afford the food. A lumpy and unlovely lot we were, we over-60s, feeding our faces, drowning our livers. And then a 15-16 year old girl, dragging her toddler, comes among us selling roses. No one buys. Everybody too busy biting, imbibing. The girl and her kid shuffle out.

Oh my countrymen, my lumpy countrymen, if I were (more) righteous I’d say that before the girl spread her sheets, she should have opened a spreadsheet and planned her future. But I am mad at our privilege, while enjoying it, and mad at the Mexican government, ruled by elites, for not doing anything to help its people, especially with education. Sure, it’s warm down there, and everybody’s outside, swarming, like flies, in the informal economy, trying to figure out, on the spur of the moment, what it’s all about and how to live another day hand to mouth.

Red red roses, the kind you’d like to give to your lady love …

My gringo friend, who with his wife owns a B &B in Mazatlan, says that this is the way the Mexicans like it. We can’t look at things totally through our own over-sympathetic, or socialist, lenses, I acknowledge. Or through rose-colored lenses, either. “These people,” as my friend put it, like to be outdoors, like not to be tied to a desk, like to do what their forbears have done for generations before them. So let them wander at 10 pm or midnight, brats in tow, among the indifferent and guzzling gringos, no skin off our behinds.

The Mexicans merely do what their family has done, my friend says, for a long time. It’s not that the government doesn’t support them. It’s that they don’t want to be in school. It’s that they have the short-term, not long-term, view of things. (Kind of like American corporate shareholders.)

God knows many of us suffer from this same disposition — our plan is for the hour at hand, for what we enjoy now, for what’s to be had. Yes, we might have an education. And then have jobs. And money in the bank. But where are we today, and tomorrow, and then the day after? Maybe not on the beach selling knick-knacks or bric-a-brac, but, could be, neither here nor there, wondering where am I, what am I doing, where is all of this going?

The normal impulse is to look away when approached by vendors. We don’t need their stuff, gods know, and don’t want it, however much we feel their need.